September 29, 2008

Google Operating System has taught me how to do this too, and you can browse up to 20% of the book. You'll have to get rid of the script's line breaks if posting to Blogger, and sorry the Blogger template is stuck at this width.

September 28, 2008

Update: Matt Silverman, Creative Director at Phoenix Designs (and sfmograph co-host) will break down the motion graphics stinger his team created for the Adobe CS4 launch. "Created in collaboration with Nando Costa from Portland design studio Nervo, and Barcelona's Vasava, the piece explores the CS4 Master Collection as we travel through the Nervo and Vasava artwork. Phoenix completed this heavy AE project in After Effects CS4 (along with Photoshop CS4, Maya, and Cinema4D), and will go over some of the new features which they used to complete the animation including 3D model import and separate X/Y/Z transforms, as well as go over an interesting use of 3D transmission layers with falloff lighting using Buena Depth Cue. Bring the kids for this one... it's going to be swell. A QuickTime of the stinger can be seen here."

September 24, 2008

SF Cutters with support from SF Mograph and Digital Cinema Society is having the "Meeting of the Year" Sept 25 at Adobe in San Francisco.

The agenda includes CS4 Production Premium, G Tech storage, and "Mini Reel" finalists -- and of course door prizes. This meeting is free, but you do need to pre-register to make sure there is a badge waiting for you and that you get refreshments courtesy of Adobe.

"Pixel Bender is Adobe’s way of packaging up (essentially) OpenGL Shader Language, for use as effects plugins to their imaging products.

The outcome will be a lot of extremely cool effects plugins. Some of these will be old effects that run much faster, meaning we can use them more freely. Some of these will new effects that would have been prohibitively slow, but are now merely non-realtime."

In CS4 can you share these pieces of code, like the early shaders and filters done for Flash 10 pictured above (from Pixelero and Mr.doob, or even something akin to Fluffy)? I'm not sure, but After Effects is supposed to support the whole set of Pixel Bender functions, while Flash currently supports only a smaller subset, e.g., no GPU acceleration.

As noted earlier today, the Cartoon filter is a Pixel Bender filter, and the other 2 new GPU-accelerated effects, Turbulent Noise and Bilateral Blur, probably are too. And from an old post here, Pixel Bender in action in the Flash beta.

"Pixel Bender runs on the GPU in the Toolkit, in Photoshop and in After Effects. Photoshop’s new pan-rotate-and-zoom of super large images is also using the GPU. Premiere is using GPU acceleration built on AIF technologies, but does not support Pixel Bender filters in CS4.

Flash runs Pixel Bender multi-threaded on the CPU in 10.0

Peter’s original point is absolutely correct. Adobe was already using GPU acceleration before CS4, but in CS4 we’re pushing it even further. We’re also doing a lot of work on scaling for bigger numbers of multiple-cores. Run a complex Pixel Bender filter in FP 10 on an 4 or 8 core system and watch the CPU utilization."

Of course investors don't understand, because the game requires they don't! Now that The Fed and its allies want the marks to cover the losses, we should really question where "the money has just disappeared" to.

Lost in the shuffle is that Cartoon is one of 3 the new GPU-accelerated effects; the others are Turbulent Noise (an improved version of Fractal Noise, but without looping) and Bilateral Blur (like a fast Smart Blur). Anyway here's the story:

Todd Kopriva:
The Cartoon effect was written using the same foundational technology that underlies Pixel Bender. So, rather than thinking about the time spent on the Cartoon effect as being just spent on the Cartoon effect, think of it as time spent by our best people on implementing, testing, and improving a platform on which all sorts of fast and flexible effects are being built.

If you want After Effects to use your GPU effectively and provide an easy way for users to create effects, then you should be happy that time was spent on the Cartoon effect.

Dave Simons:
For the whole back-story, it's what Todd said, plus this detail: Holger Winnemöller was hired into the research group at Adobe after doing his PhD thesis on real-time video abstraction.

AE I Owe You has a new tutorial called "Grain Matching" that shows a simple technique on matching each color channel instead of just slapping on grain overall.

AEIOU is now part of the galaxy of blogs absorbed by PVC. In this case it's part of a new channel called Motion Graphics & Visual Effects. According to Chris Meyer, writers slated to share their expertise include:

September 22, 2008

Adobe TV already has Adobe CS4 tours and more. Tours for AE, Premiere, and Photoshop Extended, respectively, are posted below -- though they can be viewed much better at Adobe TV. The product pages, including AE CS4, are also up and have different feature previews.

For the continuing blow-by-blow on AE, Todd Kopriva, keeper of the docs, is keeping track new resources at After Effects region of interest. Also, you might watch AE product manager Michael Coleman's Keyframes blog for more information.Chris & Trish Meyer are at the ready with After Effects CS4 New Creative Techniques at Lynda.com, which has previews for the other products too. There's more at ProVideoCoalition, Layers Magazine, and elsewhere:

'if the Canon still camera team and the video team have come together to produce the Canon EOS 5D MKII - the next HD camcorder they come out with - may just floor us all… these are very exciting times - to be someone who focuses on “creating” as opposed to the “process” and “technique” of making your vision match the “reality” of the tools you have at your disposal.'

Here's a web version of Reverie. The QuickTime version is much better, and again you can find it and detailed comments though Prolost:

More, better, and cleverer tools? Bring 'em on! Expecting the tool itself to cause an explosion of creativity and talent, and to turn the world upside down? Maybe not so much. Evolution, sure. Revolution? Um, hmm, erm...

As to some of the more breathless reports that the EOS 5D MkII eliminates the need for (a) lighting and (b) truckfuls of expensive cine lenses, tripods, dollies, crews, and such?

HD was supposed to have done away with lighting already, right? Turns out, it's not about candlepower, it's about control.

And with Canon and Nikon adapters readily available for the various 35mm relay lens adapters, RED ONEs, etc., how come Zeiss is several months behind making $15,000 Ultra Primes and Angenieux is scrambling to churn out enough $47,000 Optimos to meet demand? Perhaps there are *reasons* why cine lenses are different from stills lenses; could that be it?

Tripods & dollies & cranes, oh my? Don't need 'em--if you shooting "Blair Witch Project", or "Cloverfield", or "Medium Cool", or any "Bourne" film, or the opening shot for "The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp". If you're doing the *rest* of "The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp", or "Citizen Kane", or Wavelength", or "Michael Clayton", or "Casablanca", well, not sure a handheld 5D is gonna rock your world.

September 21, 2008

Brendan Bolles has a free upgrade of ProEXRwhich includes a variety of small fixes, and adds "a key feature that has been requested by users. Whereas the Photoshop plug-in already had a mechanism for effecting the way alpha channels were handled, we've now bumped the feature out of Easter Egg land and into legitimacy via a shiny new dialog."

September 20, 2008

PrepShootPost posted a YouTube interview with The Wire creator David Simon from last Spring, "Journalists & the Public Square." It took awhile for me to get to The Wire (and Oz); The Wire DVD boxes don't lie long around in the used bins at stores like Amoeba but you can rent them from a library too.

September 17, 2008

If, like me, you've only been skimming the discussions of the new DSLR cameras' HD movie capabilities on the informative Prolost, on John Nack, Poynter, David Pogue at the New York Times, and through other blog posts listed on CrispyFeeds, you might have missed links to actual samples listed in comments.

Update: Apart from RED products there are more cameras along these lines. Prolost and others have discussed the Ikonoskop A-cam dII (see the MacVideo.TV report and another movie from IBC), and there's the Casio Exilim EX-FH20 can record up to 1200 fps movies although at small sizes. Now back to the pages of the camera geeks and gadget blogs.

Update 2: I was going to stop but Prolost posted about Reverie an impressive new video by Vincent Laforet on the Canon site (direct link).

from Yahoo News: 'Norman Whitfield, songwriter and producer who co-wrote a string of Motown classics including "War," "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," has died.'

He also wrote and produced this song by The Temptations that still seems fresh today (despite the decline of the Motor City):

"Pixel Bender" (originally Hydra) is the official name for Adobe's new scripting language for writing fast imaging filters. The same technology is already being used to power some filters in After Effects CS3, and we can expect more throughout Adobe applications in time. For instance, according to John Nack, "an AE plug-in developer could effectively also develop runtime effects for Flash, while a Flash developer could leverage her work inside AE."

Pixel Bender will be tough going for most of us, but mere mortals can get a peek. Lee Brimelow posted 2 video tutorials on getting started with Pixel Bender and using the filters in Flash on his site gotoandlearn.com.

September 16, 2008

Bigfug has now released a version of their inexpensive commercial product Frame Runner (Windows-only) that enables FreeFrame filters in CS3. It seems like the filters come separately.

FreeFrame is an alternative framework for developing video effects plug-ins and hosts on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX and was initially intended for use in VJ applications. Pete Warden provided a free FreeFrame filters and an AE plug-in to access FreeFrame filters on Windows and Mac OS X, but he didn't update his work for CS3. Pete appears to have moved on to Apple Motion (working at Apple), but the BSD licence will let you maintain the AE versions. His Freeframe filters are still free.

September 15, 2008

Digital Arts is reporting details on Adobe's preview of After Effects CS4 at IBC 2008. Little of this was shown in the previous sneak peeks. Here's a few but not all they mentioned, and I'm sure there will be much more in the official unveiling next week:

-- After Effects CS4 ships with Imagineer System’s Mocha-AE-- a Cartoon filter that turns clips into animated movie-- AE compositions on the Premiere timeline and other Dynamic Link enhancements

-- Roundtrip editing between AE and Soundbooth-- automatic creation of compositions to match the size and framerate of mobile phone templates from Device Central

Creative Cow also has a short write-ups (another) with additional details like:-- a Mini-Flowchart and other UI enhancements-- 3D functionality with raytrace rendering moving between PS and AE-- export a multilayered AE comp to a Flash project-- separate keyframes and curves for X, Y, and ZUpdate: a Cartoon filter that's fast and works easily would be a good thing, though it might not appeal immediately to strict visual effects types. The full feature set has not been announced; these preliminary reports.

September 14, 2008

Join SF Cutters at Adobe in San Francisco, with support from SF Mograph and Digital Cinema Society, for the Sept 25 "Extravaganza Meeting of the Year." The agenda so far is "Mini Reels" and TBA, but there will be some news updates in a week or so that may fill this event to capacity.

This meeting is free, but you do need to preregister to make sure there is a badge waiting for you and that you get refreshments (courtesy of Adobe).

September 13, 2008

AE Scripts is on a roll. The latest is Zorro-The Layer Tagger, an embeddable panel script that "makes selection and isolation sets easy and possible in After Effects by adding tags to layers. Similar to the way you would tag photos in Flickr, you can tag layers in your comps and then select or isolate those layers in groups by using the tags." This one even has a couple of video tutorials; here's one on Vimeo (Motionbox was slow):

September 12, 2008

"Like to cut up and sample video? Sick of all that time-consuming scrubbing, slicing and rearranging in Vegas or Premiere? Well I’ve figured out a workflow using a collection of After Effects scripts which turns lots of tedious editing into a very quick process to output a series of video clips for your VJing pleasure."

Update: Fact checking resources like PolitiFact, SourceWatch, and FactCheck.org can be handy too. See the recent Moyers Jounal segment for a summary and discussion. FactCheck missed an EIA summary of oil production per state when criticing McCain (who got it wrong anyway), so not all conclusions are bulletproof.

John Nack explains some of the thinking behind the build-up of Photoshop's 3D plumbing. It's not just "a bunch of cool features we'll never learn to use," as quipped a comment to another Photoshop CS4 sneak peak.

via LifeHacker, Artweaver is a free Windows paint application program with a UI much like Photoshop. While missing many feature it could be handy in a pinch with its natural brushs, layers, editable text and filter packs.

September 10, 2008

For a limited time, Boris FX is offering the Glitter filter for free. Glitter is an OpenGL-accelerated filter that generates glittering sparkles and includes controls for the brightness, scale, and color of the glitters, as well as the number of rays that each glitter emits.

Glitter is available for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Avid editing and finishing systems until September 30, 2008. There's also a free tutorial: Generate a Glittering Sky.

Update: Ko Maruyama has a quick tip video to show you how to get around some little gotchas that might pop up.

Steve Hullfish, author of The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction, just started doing a weekly series of free color correction tutorials atPro Video Coalition. Each movie will be between 3 and 12 minutes; some will be quite basic while others will be "pro level." Most of the tutorials utilize Apple Color but others use Final Cut Pro, Avid, or Color Finesse in After Effects.

The tutorials will be part of a completely revised edition of the 2002 book Color Correction for Digital Video (Google Books sample) by Jaime Fowler and Hullfish, which should be out in December.

"Adobe's Terry White traveled to Photoshop World and recorded a video podcast of the keynote presentation, during which Adobe VP Johnny Loiacono and I offered some sneak peeks of the next version of Photoshop, as well as a few Adobe Labs projects expected to follow closely behind the new release. [Via] Photographer, artist, and author John Paul Caponigro summarized the demos, and the Photoshop-specific content starts around the 16-minute mark, running 20 minutes or so."

The first 20 minutes are interesting too though, for Photoshop Express-mobile features and Lightroom. Other sneak peaks can be found in these posts.

TechCrunch reports on RealDVD, which lets users legally copy DVDs to their hard drives, but with DRM intact. It lets you authorize five computers for a movie -- but its $49.99 for the first license and $19.99 for an additional four licenses!

September 4, 2008

Motion.TV and Feed have an interview with Mark Coleran on screen design. Coleran's futuristic screen and UI designs appear in The Bourne Ultimatum, Children of Men, Mission Impossible 3, The Island, The Bourne Identity, Tomb Raider, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and other films. He says he's doing software UI now, and it could be cool if it looked beyond Multi-Touch.

There's a bunch more generative processing stuff around beside the recent video by Radiohead. Toolbox is a node-based generative editor app that was featured recently on Create Digital Motion, which also features regular write ups on Processing projects. You can find demo movies of Toolbox on Vimeo, where the programmer links to Vector Field animations that do not use Perlin noise (implemented in After Effects in the Fractal Noise filter).

As you may know, Adobe Encore DVD projects are officially not cross platform.

But, from the aether, there's an unsupported trick to open a Win/Mac project in OS X /Windows. If you delete the file “ProjectMedia.acx” from the project folder before opening the project it'll open, but then you'll need to locate asset files and transcode all over again.